This passage in our Happiness text today almost redeems "Friend Heidegger" (as my old Mizzou undergrad prof, Alex von Schoenborn, used to call the Third Reich's favorite academic foot soldier--he was "Führer-rector" of Freiburg University when he joined the National Socialist party):
"…if you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get—you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time. (Or as the flow of time, a Heideggerian might say.) From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult, "a sort of personal affront, a taking-away of one's time," in the words of one scholar. There you were, planning to live on forever—as the old Woody Allen line has it, not in the hearts of your countrymen, but in your apartment—but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.
Yet, on reflection, there's something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it's so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it's so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who'd failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given—as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it's not that you've been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it's almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all."
— Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
Redeems is too strong. This complicates the legacy. The old Roman Emperor had a complicated legacy too. And we're just lucky to be here thinking about it at all.
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